[mythtv-users] 3-D UI for Myth, PNP installation, new LinuxMCE

[Jens Baumeister]

On 8/11/07, Paul Huber <paul2004x at gmail.com> wrote:

> Unfortunately, afaik, only
> nVidia's proprietary drivers support alpha-blending for X11 still, and even
> then the video quality is not great, particularly with 1080i since nVidia's
> not doing de-interlacing.
>
> This is a huge problem for Linux as a media pc platform.  I personally talked
> to both nVidia and ATI about this.  In both cases the response was, basically,
> "Linux is for servers.  Graphics performance isn't important.  95% of our
> graphics driver work is for Windows."
>
> What I don't get, and I haven't been able to get an answer on, is Mac.  Doesn't
> OS X use X11, or something similar?  They obviously have good video drivers.
> Why can't those be ported over to Linux?  Anybody know why not?

Actually, while there is an X11 port for OS X, it's not the native
display engine. Mac OS X uses Aqua, which is completely different from
X11.

Also, while OS X did recently get full UNIX certification, its
underpinnings are based on BSD and OpenStep, which means that it's
significantly different from Linux at the driver-level.  So even if
the drivers were open-source, porting them wouldn't necessarily be an
easy thing to do.

Finally, IIRC Apple is doing most of the graphics drivers in-house. I
doubt they'd have much incentive to use their knowledge to aid a
competing OS. (Not to mention all kinds of legal tape that'd probably
prevent them from doing so even if they wanted to.)

Jens